Floating Points – “Ocotillo”
Sam Shepherd, the UK producer who makes meditative electronic music under the Floating Points name, is getting ready to follow up 2021’s Promises, his absolutely beautiful 2021 collaboration with the late jazz legend Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, with his new solo album Cascade. We’ve already posted “Birth4000,” “Del Oro,” and “Key103,” three of the tracks that will appear on Cascade. Today, Floating Points shares another one.
The new Floating Points track “Ocotillo” is a fluttery instrumental zone-out that lasts for nearly nine minutes. (I had to look the word “ocotillo” up; it’s a shrub that grows in the desert.) The track features the talents of the Austrian-Ethiopian harpist Miriam Adefris, who collaborated with Floating Points on his score for the ballet Mere Mortals, but you might not recognize those harp sounds in there if you didn’t know they were there. As it develops, “Ocotillo” moves from stark ambience to nervous, jittery club music. By the time the track ends, Shepherd is flirting with footwork drum programming.
Like “Key103,” “Ocotillo” has an “alive paiting” video from artist Akiko Nakayama. Check it out below.
Cascade is out 9/13 on Ninja Tune.